The inventive concepts disclosed herein relate generally to the field of avionics systems. More particularly, embodiments of the inventive concepts disclosure relate to systems and methods for real time and historical aircraft performance prediction.
In existing aircraft operations, a pilot or other crew member often must estimate various factors associated with performing a flight, such as useful load, range, endurance, required refueling points, and determining an amount of fuel required for the flight. This estimation may be determined based on or otherwise associated with a flight plan for operation of the aircraft. However, flight performance information is typically inaccurate given differences in characteristics across aircraft, which may result from the age of engines and other components, the accuracy of torque sensors or other sensors, or misalignment between components. For example, torque values can be a main driver for performance calculations, but torque sensors may have accuracy errors on the order of ten percent, which may be exacerbated by losses in the aircraft transmission due to wear and tear.
When estimating performance factors, such as fuel required, the pilot may have to make a mental guess in order to manually adjust the fuel requirements suggested by existing performance models. However, such manual adjustments risk overestimation, which may be expensive and/or inefficient, or underestimation, which may require unplanned refueling stops or other undesired or hazardous operation of the aircraft.